I worked out from the very beginning, as an amateur novelist, that I needed to consider people, place, pace, plot and purpose. These became my “five P’s” which had to be kept in mind at all times during the writing process.
People. Novels are essentially about people, their relationships and their reactions to unusual situations. At the outset, I did have concerns about my ability to “fashion” the characters in the story and to describe them in a way which would attract the empathy of the reader. When I read novels myself, I want to “like” the characters, both villains and heroes, and I want them to be sufficiently well-drawn for me to create mental pictures of them. If action dominates a book to the extent of squeezing out the portrayal of those caught up in it (as in The Da Vinci Code) I find that I am ultimately not satisfied or convinced by it. So I had to work hard at character portrayal, both through descriptions of facial features and clothes and through conversations and actions. But there are more than 200 characters in the whole saga, and early on I had to come to terms with the fact that while some might be portrayed in depth, many others would be sketchy and even shadowy figures. I did not always get things right; for example, I still regret that I did not develop David’s character more, given the fact that as Martha’s husband and the father of her children, he figures strongly in the story even after his death. But there are some characters with whom I am reasonably content: for example Bessie the maid, Joseph Harries the Wizard, Grandpa Isaac and Grandma Jane, Patty the prostitute, servants Billy, Will and Shemi, the poetic and romantic Owain Laugharne, the tragic figure of Iestyn Price, the villainous Moses Lloyd, and in the later novels Hugh Williams, George Price, Amos Jones and Wilmot Gwynne. Among Martha’s children, the characters of Brynach and Daisy are developed more fully than those of Dewi, Betsi and Sara. The reader’s impression of all of them is of course conditioned by the manner in which Martha describes them and by the extent to which she loves them, needs them or despises them. So the portraits are anything but balanced -- and that’s the way it is in real life.
People. Novels are essentially about people, their relationships and their reactions to unusual situations. At the outset, I did have concerns about my ability to “fashion” the characters in the story and to describe them in a way which would attract the empathy of the reader. When I read novels myself, I want to “like” the characters, both villains and heroes, and I want them to be sufficiently well-drawn for me to create mental pictures of them. If action dominates a book to the extent of squeezing out the portrayal of those caught up in it (as in The Da Vinci Code) I find that I am ultimately not satisfied or convinced by it. So I had to work hard at character portrayal, both through descriptions of facial features and clothes and through conversations and actions. But there are more than 200 characters in the whole saga, and early on I had to come to terms with the fact that while some might be portrayed in depth, many others would be sketchy and even shadowy figures. I did not always get things right; for example, I still regret that I did not develop David’s character more, given the fact that as Martha’s husband and the father of her children, he figures strongly in the story even after his death. But there are some characters with whom I am reasonably content: for example Bessie the maid, Joseph Harries the Wizard, Grandpa Isaac and Grandma Jane, Patty the prostitute, servants Billy, Will and Shemi, the poetic and romantic Owain Laugharne, the tragic figure of Iestyn Price, the villainous Moses Lloyd, and in the later novels Hugh Williams, George Price, Amos Jones and Wilmot Gwynne. Among Martha’s children, the characters of Brynach and Daisy are developed more fully than those of Dewi, Betsi and Sara. The reader’s impression of all of them is of course conditioned by the manner in which Martha describes them and by the extent to which she loves them, needs them or despises them. So the portraits are anything but balanced -- and that’s the way it is in real life.
Place. In a sense, this was the easiest aspect of the story to deal with. As a geographer by training I have a well-developed sense of place, an eye for landscape details and some understanding of what marks out the landscape of Carningli and North Pembrokeshire as being different from other landscapes. But I had to rein in my instinct for describing landscape, on the grounds that my fascination with it is not necessarily matched by that of the reader! Having wandered around Cilgwyn and Carningli for thirty years or so, I know almost every nook and cranny of this beloved landscape, and I have tried to give Martha the same sense of “belonging” that I feel myself. She loves the mountain and all its moods almost as dearly as she loves life itself. She feels that the mountain is a part of her, and that she is a part of the mountain. In her relationship with Carningli and the Plas, she illustrates, as perfectly as I can manage it, what the Welsh word hiraeth means -- longing, belonging and loving a piece of land, whether inherited or adopted. That is not a peculiarly Celtic thing, but the link between land and people is undoubtedly very strong in Wales, as almost every Welsh writer has recognized. Because Martha loves her home territory so much it is, I hope, natural for her to describe in the pages of her diary what happens to the sky and the land when there is a thunder-storm, or a torrential deluge, or a heavy snowfall. It is also quite natural for her to gasp in wonderment when she sees the abundant bird life on the cliffs between Newport and Cwm yr Eglwys, or when she wades through an early summer meadow full of flowers and herbs, or when she sees the lengthening shadows of evening among the summit crags. At intervals in all of the novels I have been at pains to describe -- briefly -- “the land” in some of its moods, as a counterbalance to the heavy or dramatic episodes which hit poor Martha between the eyes with alarming frequency! All five of the Angel Mountain novels are “regional novels”, rooted in a place which is well known to most of the early readers of the books. The early marketing and publicity efforts for the series were directed primarily at Pembrokeshire people but also readers who know and love North Pembrokeshire as a holiday destination. I was confident that the readers of the books would like the locations, and much less confident that they would like Mistress Martha!
Pace. Some authors, Dan Brown included, drive a story forward so relentlessly that there is only one gear -- superdrive. It has worked for him, but the story that came to me had a good deal of quietness in it, and so there had to be many tranquil episodes. There also had to be time for character development and for the exploration of personal relationships. But I also had to pack in many violent action episodes. So I tried to develop a wave-like structure on the way to the book’s climax, with action-packed episodes interspersed with quiet ones in which I develop the characters through their involvement in local traditions or in domestic activities. There is nothing new about this, and writers and musicians have realized over the centuries that on the way to the climax of a piece andante needs to follow allegro, and vice versa. But each wave needs to be a little higher than the last, and the last wave is the one that crashes onto the shore with the greatest force, bringing the piece to an end. All perfectly sensible -- but then I realized that the first part of the story in my head (in On Angel Mountain) had a “double whammy” climax, and I accepted that from a technical point of view it was not a bad idea to have two massive waves at the end, with the final one arriving out of the blue just when the reader thinks that the story is all over! Readers told me that it worked for the first novel in the series, and so I continued the tradition in the other four as well.
Plot. Each one of the five novels has a complex plot, given to me in considerable detail during that strange night of delirium in 1999. That is not to say that all was decided in advance, and that no “manufacturing” was needed. In fact a good deal of tweaking and reorganizing had to be done, and various episodes that were fixed in my head had to be dumped because they did not fit into the main story-line as it was developing. Stories can become too complex, and there is then the risk of leaving the reader behind as the twists and turns become ever more convoluted. Think of Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White! Various other episodes had to be changed during the writing process because Mistress Martha did not approve of the direction in which I wanted to take her. So there was some scrapping and rewriting of sections -- and in retrospect the reason was almost always that I wanted Martha to do something that would have been out of character. Experienced authors say that their characters and stories take on a life and a momentum of their own, and that it is unwise to resist the route that they choose to take. I think I now know what that means. In each of the novels, several story-lines are interwoven, and that involved a lot of careful planning and hard work on my part. In a sense, the simplest stories are in On Angel Mountain and Rebecca and the Angels -- but even here there is more going on than might meet the eye, with an adventure story running in parallel with other stories and mysteries relating to Martha’s family and friends and to her sexual adventures. The darkest story-line is in Dark Angel, where Martha reveals her insecurity and her paranoia while at the same time showing her compassion and her devotion to her family. By far the most complex story -- and the one which gave me the greatest pleasure as a writer -- is “House of Angels”, which weaves together five different story-lines.
Purpose. The most important part of the unwritten contract between writer and reader is the bit that says that the writer must entertain. In historical fiction the writer should educate as well, giving the reader a glimpse of another world long gone. That glimpse should be reasonably accurate and authentic, but not too slavishly based upon “the truth.” If a writer can evoke the sights and smells of the time, and the feeling of what life must have been like for heroes, villains and other characters, so much the better. And as I have said, for a geographer like me, the building up of a “sense of place” is very important indeed. But if novels are really about ordinary people in extraordinary situations, a novelist has to concentrate very hard on character, characteristics, appearance and personal relationships. On almost every page of a novel there is a developing relationship between one character and another, and therein lies the challenge for the writer and the excitement for the reader. But through the welter of events and personal interactions something else has to be visible -- namely the author‘s “take” on life. So what is my take on life, and what am I really trying to do in the novels? Many readers have said to me as they have worked their way through the saga “Poor Martha! Why does she have to suffer so much? And when will she really find true happiness?” One of my readers got so upset with what Martha was having to put up with that she went up to Plas Ingli to pray for her, in the hope that she might find peace. Well, my heroine does have to put up with a great deal of brutality, suffering and prejudice, and she does meet some very unpleasant people, and she does lose almost all of those whom she loves in the most appalling of circumstances. She seems to weep more frequently than she laughs. But here is a gentle reminder for readers -- remember that the novels give brief “snapshots” of her life, and that there are long periods which I have not written about at all. Let us imagine that those periods were happy, and mundane, and maybe even boring -- and maybe therefore not very interesting to the reader or to the author! I am sure that Mistress Martha had her good times as a wife, as a mother, and as a merry widow. Conjure those episodes up for yourself, if you will! Then you can try to understand my real purpose in writing the saga, which I am now beginning to clarify for myself. Whatever happens to her, she grits her teeth and fights back. She even fights her way out of the miseries associated with miscarriage, the murder of a husband, or the loss of a child. When she is plunged into the dark horrors of depression, she fights her way back into the bright light of a spring morning -- and she does this more than once. So while I am trying to describe a set of characters in a rough landscape and a rough time, and while I am trying to improve my own understanding of the human condition, I am also doing something which is ultimately life-affirming. The books are actually quite “moral” in the sense that virtue and depravity are both rewarded in appropriate ways. The wicked are punished, and the good are rewarded -- maybe not instantly, but all in good time. Since I was a young man, I have had unbounded admiration for people who have the capacity to cope with whatever life throws at them -- sometimes with quiet stoicism and sometimes with flames in their eyes and iron in their sinews. Of course I love Martha and many of the other characters to whom I have given life, but in writing about them I suppose what I have really been doing is composing a hymn to the human spirit.
(The above text is an extract from Chapter 3 of "Martha Morgan's Little World." pp 52-58.)
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